


Blaseball does not exist. This Is Blaseball.

by InslideBlaseball



Category: Blaseball (Video Game)
Genre: Hades Tigers (Blaseball Team)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-03
Updated: 2020-10-03
Packaged: 2021-03-07 19:47:22
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,493
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26793112
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/InslideBlaseball/pseuds/InslideBlaseball
Summary: A search for the spirit of Violence. Mathematical proof that Blaseball does not exist. Bob finds the meaning of life.
Comments: 1
Kudos: 5





	Blaseball does not exist. This Is Blaseball.

**Author's Note:**

> Originally published 29/08/2020 on the Inslide Blaseball newsletter: https://inslideblaseball.substack.com/p/blaseball-does-not-exist-this-is

Blaseball is a splort. A splort is a game that does not exist. Splorts are tangentially related to sports, which are also games that do not exist, although they express their nonexistence in different ways. So blaseball is similarly related to b*seball, which is a sport. It doesn’t matter if you don’t know how it works. It’s not real, anyway. It’s all made up. If you still wanna know, [here](https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baseball).

In this article, I’m going to show you what blaseball is like and what splorts are all about. To do so we will have to summon an angry spirit. Or, well, my intern Bob is going to do so. I’m going to sit here, consume zero-sugar soft drinks with lemon and fresh mint in them, and write.

Blaseball has seasons, like regular sports. Every season lasts 6 days, with a siesta on Sunday. As I write we’re in the last day of Season 4. The Hades Tigers (the most passionate team) are obviously heading for a close 3 - 2 win against the Chicago Firefighters (the most fiery team). Following which, they will turn the Old Chicago Water Tower into the New Chicago Fire Tower by setting it ablaze with eternally burning hellfire. Obviously. Such are the terms of [the bet established between the two teams’ fanbases](https://media.discordapp.net/attachments/748949106558369926/749302309653315654/contract.png), and I see no other outcome. I am not biased.

Blaseball teams all belong to a particular league, also like in regular sports. There’s two main ones: the Evil League, and the Good League. The Blaseball Gods divided both into Lawful and Chaotic halves, for a total of 2 main leagues and 4 sub leagues. Every league has 10 teams; every sub-league has 5. The Hades Tigers are the current best team of the Evil League, the Chicago Firefighters of the Good League.

An Evil team took the first two seasons in stunning fashion: the Philadelphia Pies (the most scrumptious team) were unstoppable. But during Season 3 the Hades Tigers upset the Pies in quarterfinals and clinched a win. Two players carried the Tigers to victory: the batters Landry Violence and Jessica Telephone. The latter will be the subject of another story. The former is what concerns us now.

Landry Violence is scientific proof that Blaseball does not exist, and yet that Blaseball is everything that matters.

He was not exactly a blaseball player. Not in the regular human sense, at least. “Landry Violence” refers to both a spirit which inhabits a human host, and the possessed person. Landry the spirit takes over the body and mind of such hosts. From interviews with them, we understand it’s very much consensual and not traumatic at all. The opposite, in fact: it’s more a co-existence of the Landry spirit and the Landry host within one body and one mind. The spirit provided knowledge, motor skills and a deep understanding of the metagame. The host provided passion and material existence.

I could find no clear logic between which hosts Landry chose and which ones he did. Except, perhaps, their enthusiasm for Blaseball and their dedication to the Hades Tigers. This is not to say the spirit chose the most ardent fans, those who could afford to go to the most games or buy the most merch. It’s more that he picked his hosts from a pool of baseline enthusiastic fans, and considered his descent (or ascent, if the spirit came from below) a gift for one of them. So the fans saw it, at least.

For physically unexplainable reasons, the eventual fitness or age or presence of a disability in any of Landry’s hosts didn’t affect their ingame performance. An 80 year old man dropped his cane upon being chosen and ran like it was nobody’s business for the length of the game. A former ironworker who had lost their right hand in an industrial accident played better, with one hand, than many do with two.

During Season 3, Umpires started incinerating players. You ask me why, that’s a whole other story. They’re game officers which sit at the sidelines and make rulings. We don’t know what sets them off. We do know that it always happens under a solar eclipse. There were a lot of solar eclipses in Season 3. In the very last game of the very last match, Hades Tigers vs New York Millennials (the most hardworking team), a rogue Umpire’s eyes turned white. It attacked Landry’s host.

In that moment, Landry Violence became Blaseball.

Blaseball is a splort. A splort is a game that does not exist. We cannot say what a game is because words fail us, and there is no feature which forms a common element in all games. The meaning of “game” is an interlapping series of definitions, constantly twisting in and out and over each other. We cannot say what existence is because words, similarly, fail us. Existence is an overlapping series of singular perceptions, out of which arises something we all share. If we find it fun, if we find it wonderful, if incredible things can happen in it, we call it a game.

In that moment, Landry Violence tapped out of the game of Blaseball and out of existence. To protect his host, the spirit leaped out and took the Umpire’s fury upon himself.

The host was Paula Turnip. Instantly after the incineration, she picked up Violence's bat, screamed "Violence begets violence!" and tried to steal third base. The game went on. Paula joined the Tigers, and, again, that’s a whole other story.

But Landry was not forgotten. “DO IT FOR VIOLENCE!” is still a common chant in Tigers games. Paula still wields his bat and jacket. The spectacular way in which he died, almost out of a Greek tragedy, made him an icon for all Hades Tigers fans, players, and beyond. Much has been written on Landry, and I’m here adding to the pile.

This is Blaseball.

Blaseball is putting half a dozen or so nonexistent people, at most, on the field and seeing their combined non-experiences and non-personalities and non-abilities represented on a screen. Blaseball is then creating from those pixels and wires and silicon and flashing images a wonderful story. Blaseball is an illusion we like to believe in because its weirdness and impossibility is more familiar and comforting to us than the grey drudgery of everyday life. Splorts are a refuge from the terror of being human: so they become a celebration of all that makes us human.

Blaseball isn’t real: the _marrow_ we suck out of its bones is. Consider one of those hot dogs with mustard and onions you get at exorbitant prices from the stadium’s stands. The *casing* of the hot dog is as thin and immaterial as to be pratically inexistent. It isn’t real: the meat is. The casing holds it together and gives it just enough shape for us to *bite* into the meat under.

A lot of this meaning-crafting I’ve mentioned comes from the impossibility of answering a particular question. It’s reasonable to think that Landry the spirit would’ve survived the incineration. After all, having every atom in your body vibrate to an immensely high frequency and instantly go up in flames and turn to ash…that’s a physical matter. And if he hadn’t sacrificed himself, no one would’ve blamed him. No one would’ve known there had been another option. The mechanics of how the Umpires select their targets are utterly unknown to us.

So _why_ did Landry do it?

One can imagine various reasons, certainly. But _imagining_ is not enough for us fearless Blaseball journalists. We need to _know_. So I sent my intern Bob to commune with Landry’s spirit. Bob has no idea how to commune with spirits, but he’s an intern, so he’s supposed to learn on the job and he thought it’d be fun to try anyway.

He went to Hades and paced the Sixth Circle Stadium, or The Ampitheater, or The Orpheum for hours on end. He tried drawing a pentagram across the entire 60.5 square ft (~20 square metres) of the field, sitting in the middle of it, and chanting in an unintelligible but vaguely Latin sounding language. He took an electric guitar amplifier (he’s in a post-rock glitchcore synthwave death metal band with math rock and weird folk influences) there and tuned it to various random wavelengths. He heard weird mumblings which may have been the sounds of the dead or codes from some military listening post, but certainly not Landry.

Finally, exhausted, he took an antique typewriter from a frigid, famous early 20th century English poet who had been confined to the realm of the dead, went to the place in the stadium where Landry was incinerated, and tried to engage in automatic writing. For the uninitiated, it’s the utterly scientific idea of producing written words without consciously writing. The words, in theory, then come from some other entity. Bob hoped it would be Landry.

Here’s what he gave me:

[ ](https://cdn.substack.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F5abfbeef-4140-41e7-885f-764f9606629b_865x559.png)


End file.
